


Back to Black

by mamalovesherbagels



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: but description of blood, completely evil, not that graphic, tagged as depiction of violence to be safe, this is evil
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24372877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamalovesherbagels/pseuds/mamalovesherbagels
Summary: There's a scar on Maddie's shoulder. She always told Chimney it was from surgery following repetitive injuries from years of high school and college softball. The truth isn't as pretty. (This started as a quick tumblr drabble but my demon followers demanded more!)
Relationships: Maddie Buckley/Howie "Chimney" Han
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Back to Black

The water is streaming out her eyes so steadily it feels like they’re bleeding, collecting, pooled up with the actual blood both seeping over top of her blouse and crawling down below towards her stomach. She can’t find the words; doesn’t know if there are any for a moment like this. She cries, she gasps, she yelps. Doug does all the talking.

“It’s alright, it’s alright, stop your crying,” he instructs in a voice she remembers from all those years ago, the voice he used to calm a young heart patient in front of her nursing class and she had fallen so smitten so quickly.

“You’re not dying, Maddie, not this time. I’ll fix it up. Next time you try to leave me, I won’t though, and I won’t aim for your shoulder.”

“Stop moving, stop flinching, you’re fine,” he continues, voice eerily calm and patient, “you should be glad. If there’s one thing my dad actually did teach me, it was how to aim a gun. Guess all those hunting trips weren’t so bad after all.”

“Okay,” is the word she does finally find, because really, what the hell is she supposed to say to that?

She doesn’t know how it got to this point.

She wants to go back, back to the first date where he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and asked her what such a special girl was doing in a nursing school in Pennsylvania, of all places. Thought I’d find someone like you on the beach in LA or something, he had said. 

It was a stupid, cheesy thing to say and a very overt attempt at flattery, but the attention, the interest had seemed so sincere. Did he love her, really want her that badly from the start? Or did he just want her as someone to control? She doesn’t know.  
She doesn’t know how coffee on a bench outside the hospital he, a very busy and talented and important surgical intern, was training at turned into living together six months later and turned into arguments over how low cut her shirts were or weren’t and turned into wedding plans after the most dramatic apologies turned into slaps in the face turned into a nice house in the suburbs turned into a bullet in the shoulder.

She can’t turn back time, though, she knows this. She doesn’t think she can change the future, either. She had tried to, tried to get out and leave and now her husband is stitching up the wound he caused, threatening that the next one will go right in her heart.

Right in the heart, where he, chief of cardiothoracic surgery would know how to save her, he clarifies. He just wouldn’t.

She’s trapped. She knows she is. There’s no way out that doesn’t end in her last breath being watched over by the man who stole it.

This is how it ends, how *she* ends, with him.

.

Except it doesn’t, in the end. The next Christmas is the one she realizes he’s going to end up killing her even if she does stay and abide by his every will, and she thinks she would like to see her little brother one more time before she dies, so she might as well leave.

It’s him, her beloved Buck, who convinces her to stay, to start over as if she has a chance. And she does have one, she learns, and despite all odds, when Doug does eventually find her, she comes out on top. Just barely.

She is the one who watches him take his last breath.

He’s gone, and she’s hoping the most horrid details of their relationship will die with him.

But it’s Doug, and it would be so unlike him to never stop trying to have the last laugh, even from beyond the grave.

“What?” Maddie asks, hoping her flinch just comes off as a means of showing surprise. It’s kind of a random question, to be fair.

“Your brother is asking because,” Chimney starts to explain with a laugh, “we were helping a man with a gunshot wound today and when I asked him what his pain level was to try and keep him awake he said it felt like a shark had bitten him. Buck thought it was hilarious.”

“I don’t… I don’t think it would feel like that,” Maddie says, trying to force a smile.

“Of course it wouldn’t,” Buck says as if it’s the most obvious and the most hilarious thing in the world, “a bullet is like one little super quick hole, while a shark bite is a bunch of pointy jaws–”

“I don’t think we should try and compare the pain between the two,” Maddie finds herself snapping.

“Mads,” Buck says, confused by such a harsh reaction to him just joking around, “I just thought it was funny because–”

“I get it,” she says quickly, desperate to save face… but then she looks at the curious expressions worn by Chimney and Buck and knows she needs to offer an explanation, “it’s just… when I used to work in the ER, you know, I saw gunshot wounds all the time. Memories, you know. Hard to joke about when you see that many everyday.”

“Yeah, I guess, sorry,” Buck says slowly, trying to decide if he buys it or not.

“Were there really that many shootings in Hershey?” Chimney asks, trying to lighten the mood but it has the opposite effect.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” she yells, dropping the mug in her hands.

“Oh.. oh my god, oh my god Maddie I’m so sorry,” he says quickly, moving to hug her, “it’s personal, that’s okay, you don’t have to talk about it if you’re not ready. It’s okay–”

“It’s fine,” she says, a hauntingly distant look in her eye, “it just… doesn’t feel like a shark bite.”

“…Wait… you’re not saying… did someone describe…?”

“Maddie… did Doug fucking shoot you?” Buck asks, hardly able to hear himself say it because he feels like water is flooding his eardrums.

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it!” she shrieks, sprinting into the bathroom and locking the door before either her brother or her boyfriend can snap out of their shock.

“There’s a scar on her shoulder,” Chimney says hollowly, “she said it was from… oh my god.”


End file.
